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Hello everyone! C-O Connections is loving this year’s challenges with Miss Wyatt. Our class has been reviewing how to leave good, positive comments when we visit other blogs. We are also working on writing sentences correctly, with capital letters and ending punctuation.

Quite a bit has changed since last year’s blogging challenge, but our commitment to establishing world connections has not faltered. We began this blog with two teachers, Mrs. Cranford and Mrs. Odom, thus the C-O. I have now been givenan additional responsibility on this campus, but Mrs. Odom and I remain with the student bloggers of the C-O Connections. We hope that you will continue to visit our blog and continue to leave your comments because we love to read them.

On our “Meet Our Class” page, you will read a little bit about us. Last year we were rewarded for our hard work by winning the 2009 Edubloggers Challenge. You will see the badge posted along the sidebar of our blog. Our intermediate school in East Texas is a wonderful place to go to school, and we will be sharing our experiences with you this year.

Please let us know what you think. After all, YOU are the reason we continue to grow and make even more connections.

Recently our local newspaper stopped by to interview some of our student bloggers. The students were eager to share their views on blogging and how it has improved their writing skills and motivated them to read more.

Blogging has truly changed our class. It has connected us with some wonderful classrooms and presented opportunities that we would never have encountered otherwise.

Have you visited other blogs and left comments to students in other countries?Would you like to continue blogging?How does it make you feel to know that other students and your parents are reading what you are writing at school? What interesting things have you learned about from visiting other blogs? How do you overcome the challenges of reading blogs that are written by students who speak another language?

These are some of the questions that we asked our students. Their answers were recorded on video and you can see and also hear them here.

The students had good answers for these questions, but I would like to share a little bit more. As a resource teacher, I jump on every opportunity to showcase my students’ abilities. When I returned from the 2009 TCEA Conference, I was convinced that my students could improve a multitude of skills through blogging. There were no blogs on our intermediate campus, so we would be the pioneers in this technological adventure. Were we up for it? You bet!

We wanted the other students to notice what we were doing and ask their teachers why they had no classroom blog. In a short time, our students had visitors from over 35 countries and over 200 comments posted to their blog. Every Thursday, these students proudly wear their C-O Connections blogging t-shirts.Other students acknowledge them by name now. They possess an ownership for their learning and a confidence that they did not have before blogging. Parents are beginning to post in reply to their child’s posts and have subscribed to our blog. The process of blogging has brought a closeness between school and community, and more importantly, between child and parent.

Making this change in our classroom curriculum has truly made a difference in the lives of each of my students, and some of them will never be the same.

We are so excited to begin blogging. Blogging is going to improve our students’ abilities to write with correct spelling, usage, and punctuation, to convey their thoughts on varied subjects and places that they will visit virtually, and to react appropriately to YOUR feedbacks. Our blog, C-O Connections, is named for Mrs. Pam Cranford and Mrs. Laura Odom. Please check back here often and be sure to visit our class web site at www.tinyurl.com/pcranford